Word: phoney
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...News scorns reformers, and flaunts the details of Manhattan's juiciest scandals with a self-righteousness that does not conceal a smirk. Its general attitude toward manners & morals is the tough kid's jeer: if they're good they're probably phoney and certainly ridiculous...
Expertly sandwiched between the pratfalls and the broad pie-throwing burlesque of suburban manners lies a richer comedy idea-the alchemy by which a phoney hero is transmuted from the base metal of conventional heroics to the pure gold of true heroism...
...cast in general is up to its great dramatic roles and Mabel Paige is particularly phoney and constantly intoxicated mother. It's well worth the price of admission. And, of yes, there's that exciting little sequence where Helen Walker pulls up her skirts to trap an evil-minded Nazi gunman...
...mysteriously murdered, and due to evident circumstances, Grant is suspected. Miss Fontaine is taken with fear of her husband, fear that he is a murderer and that she may be his next victim. She tries to flee from him, but he reaches her, and in the most depressingly "phoney" scene of the film, tells her the truth; that he is innocent. The ending to the original story, that the hero actually is the murderer, is replaced (to avoid jarring the public's emotions) by a happy Hollywood finale, which mildly cripples an otherwise magnificent motion picture...
...story involves a timid map-maker, Charles Butterworth, who comes home one day to find his whole family engaged in war work of one kind or another. Trying to keep in step, he gets pushed around mercilessly until he conceives the idea of trapping the Jap fleet with a phoney map of Shangri-La. After an interlude in a Jap internment camp done with extremely poor taste, the map is found to be genuine; but Papa saves the day by informing the U. S. forces of some nearby islands that would rise above water on the next...